Eight-Team XFL Competitor Plans to Launch in February 2019

The revived XFL won’t be the only alternative football league hoping to seize Americans’ attention.

Charlie Ebersol, the son of longtime NBC Sports executive Dick Ebersol and director of the 30 for 30 documentary about the original XFL his father created with WWE’s Vince McMahon, announced Tuesday that he plans to launch a football league next February. (ESPN’s Darren Rovell has all the details.)

The league is called the Alliance of American Football and will feature eight 50-man teams playing a 10-game schedule that begins on February 9, the Saturday after next year’s Super Bowl.

Funding for the league comes from the Peter Thiel-led Founder’s Fund, Barstool Sports investors the Chernin Group, former Vikings pass rusher Jared Allen and others.

The league’s inaugural game and championship game will be broadcast on CBS and one regular-season game per week will air on CBS Sports Network. It promises a new kind of broadcast, wrapping up games in two-and-a-half hours and without TV timeouts.

The league is hoping to draw talent from the wealth of high-level college players who don’t make the NFL. Teams will have the right to draft players who played college football in their local market, similar to the territorial pick system that existed in the early days of the NBA.

Ebersol’s league has a more detailed vision for what it will be than McMahon’s new XFL. McMahon announced in January that the revived XFL would launch in 2020 with eight teams of 40 players playing a 10-game schedule. Details beyond that, such as when the games would be played or where they would be broadcast, were scarce. McMahon did repeatedly hint, however, that players in his league would be required to stand for the national anthem.

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